It’s a car with heightened senses. Travelling through a mysterious world, it senses its way through the landscape, just like an animal. The surreal environment seamlessly blends nature and fantasy. As the story unfolds, it reveals the vehicle is intuitive, predicts danger, and supports the driver’s natural abilities on the road. The film’s artistic expression of automotive technology defies convention, and draws you into a safety message too often communicated in technical ways.

THE BUDGET – 200.000 EURO for a 90/120-second automotive film featuring the Mazda6 in motion.

THE PROBLEM – A traditional shoot would have guzzled the entire budget and not left any money for creating an intriguing, surreal, arty, modern landscape in postproduction. The other issue was how to integrate animal footage into the scenes.

THE SOLUTION - Combine a CG car (rendered in 3D), matte paintings for the landscape and background, abstract 3D-shapes as additional elements for the surreal setting, and insert cuts and live action stock footage of animals to create a unique and stunning world. Edit fast-paced sequences and more atmospheric wide-shots. Use camera movements only in an easy or highly stylized way and avoid typical camera moves of standard car films.

MATTE PAINTINGS:

How do you create an environment that has never been seen before?

The combination of matte paintings and additional 3D-elements gave us all the creative freedom we needed. Matte paintings, huge photorealistic paintings of landscapes, were projected on 3D-meshes. This made it possible to integrate rendered 3D-objects, like a car or abstract shapes into the scenes. It even gave us the possibility to play with camera movements.

STOCK FOOTAGE:

It was a tough task to find high quality shots that seamlessly fit the environment. We searched almost every known library, until we found what we needed. A shoot with animals in front of a green screen would have been too expensive, and would have needed too much time for training animals to achieve the desired movements.

USED SOFTWARE:

Softimage XSi, Cinema 4D, After Effects, Nuke, Discreet Flint, Avid Media Composer, Adobe Photoshop